I understand the power did come on in Texas awhile back, although it isn’t clear to me if everyone is getting clean water out of their faucets by now. The one thing I do know is that Texas isn’t going to reform the system that caused the power/water disaster last February.

On March 5, the Austin American-Statesman reported that $16 billion in overcharges for wholesale electricity would not be reversed.

The overcharges occurred because the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid and is commonly known as ERCOT, kept the prices at the maximum level allowable — $9,000 per megawatt hour — during the 32-hour period. ERCOT should have stopped intervening by then because the power crisis was over and instead let supply and demand determine pricing, Potomac said.

As I understand it, the issue is not that the  $9000-per-hour rate was allowed for the entire time of the weather emergency, but that the rate was allowed to remain at $9000 per hour for 32 hours longer than the actual emergency. Thus, it was a windfall. “Potomac” is “Potomac Economics, a Virginia-based firm that’s paid by the state to provide an arm’s-length assessment of the Texas power grid.”

The Public Utility Commission oversees ERCOT. At ERCOT’s request, it initially set the price at the $9,000 cap — from a market price of about $1,200 at the time — during a specially called meeting Feb. 15 in an effort to incentivize as many generators as possible to keep producing power early in the weather emergency.

I am guessing this is connected to the outrageous bills some Texans got after the power outage. OK, but why can’t the outrageous overcharges be reversed?

Because it’s hard.

“There are always winners and losers on both sides (of a transaction), because that pie doesn’t change size, even if you reprice,” said Randa Stephenson, LCRA’s senior vice president for wholesale markets. “It’s really hard to go back and change the rules when people make business decisions off of them.”

LCRA is Lower Colorado River Authority, a company that was able to keep most of its power operations functioning. I take it they cleaned up, big time.

A couple of days ago, Texas Monthly reported that LCRA and others have nothing to worry about.

While many Texans last week were worried about sky-high electric bills from February’s winter storms, the state’s sole utility commissioner was privately reassuring out-of-state investors who profited from the crisis that he was working to keep their windfall safe.

Texas Monthly has obtained a recording of a 48-minute call on March 9 in which Texas Public Utility Commission chairman Arthur D’Andrea discussed the fallout from the February power crisis with investors. During that call, which was hosted by Bank of America Securities and closed to the public and news media, D’Andrea took pains to ease investors’ concerns that electricity trades, transacted at the highest prices the market allows, might be reversed, potentially costing trading firms and publicly traded generating companies millions of dollars.

“I apologize for the uncertainty,” D’Andrea said, promising to put “the weight of the commission” behind efforts to keep billions of dollars from being returned to utilities that were forced—thanks to decisions by the PUC—to buy power at sky-high prices, even after the worst of the blackout had passed.

But wait, there’s more — the Texas legislature proposed that $5.1 billion of the $16 billion windfall be “reallocated.”  Lt. Governor Dan Patrick advocated doing this, a development that perplexed Texas Monthly, since Patrick really isn’t into doing things. Texas Monthly reported today:

In normal times, the lieutenant governor is most comfortable focusing on red-meat culture war issues, such as bathroom bills and demanding the Star-Spangled Banner be played before sporting events. But as Texas’s second-ranking statewide elected official, one who controls every bill that passes through the state Senate, his job often calls for him to oversee legislative responses to crises. When it does, the former radio host usually becomes a bullhorn, drawing attention to himself and the crisis, and demands private solutions to issues rather than legislative ones that conflict with his conservative worldview.

And, indeed, Patrick seems utterly uninterested in overhauling the stupid “free market” system that left much of the state without power and water for days. But for some reason he has zeroed in on the $5.1 billion as the hill he’s prepared to defend, if not die on.

Little more than two weeks after his press tour, Patrick berated Governor Greg Abbott’s only remaining appointee on the PUC, Arthur D’Andrea, in a rare Senate committee hearing appearance. The lieutenant governor then suspended every rule he could to rush the passage of a contested plan to claw back the $5.1 billion, before encountering opposition from House Speaker Dade Phelan. Finally, after his fight seemed all but dead Tuesday evening, Texas Monthly broke news that D’Andrea had promised to try to protect the windfall of investors who made money off the blackouts. Patrick then revived his push for the House to follow the Senate’s lead and order the PUC to reprice.

Patrick’s trying to do something useful, which is totally out of character, has fueled spectulation that he will run for governor in 2022.

Oh, and D’Andrea has resigned.

What this whole episode reveals, seems to me, is the degree to which the Texas Republicans are more interested in maximizing profits for fossil fuel companies than in providing affordable and reliable energy. If I lived in Texas and had gotten some $10,000 bill for a few days of electricity I think I would be a tad, um, miffed at all this.

And from what I’ve read, no one is seriously considering such reforms as uniting with the national grid or requiring energy suppliers to weather-proof their oil pumps and gas lines. Some bills introduced in the legislature sorta kinda proposed that weatherproofing would be nice, but they did not stipulate who would pay for the upgrades. And there has been no serious discussion of eliminating the unregulated system.

Many Texas politicians are, I’m sure, assuming that the February freeze was a once-in-a-century freak storm. But it probably wasn’t.

Back in February, Ezra Klein wrote an op ed for the New York Times that made two important points:

One, “Climate change promises far more violent events to come.”

Two, “The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t.”

The next big unexpected but much predicted actic freeze in Texas could easily wipe out the power grid for months, not days. And that could happen next winter. It’s almost certain to happen while a lot of the bozos in the Texas government now are still in office. And as they stand on  the ruins of many lives and jobs, and the Texas economy in general, they will promise to build back some other Ayn Rand monstrosity of an unregulated system so that their cronies in the fossil fuel industry can get richer. That’s a given.

And I’m not at all certain that Texas voters will demand anything different.

Along these lines, do see In the shadow of its exceptionalism, America fails to invest in the basics at the Washington Post. Excellent analysis of how we’ve been neglecting infrastructure for more than 50 years.

So another mass shooting by some screwed-up white man who decided the answer to his personal problems was to kill women, preferably Asian women. Another Tuesday in America.

With the caveat that anything I say about Robert Aaron Long, the alleged Atlanta spa killer, is speculation on my part — misogyny and racism certainly seem apparent in his actions. I have also read today about the way conservative evangelicalism foments a “purity culture” that could have driven Long to want to kill Asian women who work at massage parlors. (See this analysis at Religion Dispatches.)  According to this theory, Long’s extremely screwed up notions about sex and sexuality led him to see himself as a victim of his own desires, and in his mind he was justified in killing women who were the objects of those desires. Because heaven forbid he should take any responsibility for himself.

But, as I said, that’s all speculation. The more important question right now is how are we responding to the Atlanta mass shooting?

Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County, Georgia, Sheriff’s Department, showed us What Not to Do. “While hedging a bit, Baker told reporters there was no immediate reason to think that the White shooter had a racial motivation,” writes Margaret Sullivan at WaPo. “Why not? Well, because that’s what the suspect told police, Baker said at a news conference Wednesday.”

This was followed by The Words That Will Live in Infamy: “He was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did,” Baker said. We learned later that Baker had a history of posting anti-Asian imagery on Facebook.

Just time for a couple of quick notes. President Biden has voiced support for filibuster reform — essentially, a return to the talking filibuster. Mitch McConnell is threatening to grind the Senate to a halt if Democrats don’t let him keep his power to grind the Senate to a halt.  Basically, Mitch is threatening to punish Democrats for tinkering with the filibuster by continueing to do what he’s been doing for the past several years.

In other news, a group of House Republicans, not all of them QAnoners, are seriously threatening to impeach President Biden if he doesn’t continue to build Trump’s border wall. Of course, as long as they’re a minority there’s not much they can do.

It’s not clear when this happened, but a man was arrested outside the Vice President’s Washington residence who had a car full of weapons.

Politico reports that some Republicans are starting to suspect they bungled their response to the recently passed covid passage.

Hope you’re having a reasonably pleasant St. Patrick’s Day.

Last week there were reports that several Republican-led state governments had planned to use all of the covid relief money they received to pay for — no surprise here — tax cuts. At the last minute, the Senate added language to the bill to stop that.

The state relief primarily is intended to make up for revenue shortfalls caused by the pandemic, so that state employees don’t have to be laid off or programs cut. “Some $350 billion will be divvied up between the 50 states, D.C. and the territories, funds meant to backstop state and local government programs and to pay for capital investments,” it says here.

Of course, if it so happens the state’s finances aren’t in that bad a shape, they could always use the money in some way to directly help their own citizens, perhaps by providing more food or housing assistance. Or they could use the money to help small businesses stay afloat a bit longer. They can spend it on a lot of things.

Under the new law, $25 billion will be divided equally among states, while $169 billion will be allocated based on a state’s unemployment rate. States can use the money for pandemic-related costs, offsetting lost revenues to provide essential government services, and for water, sewer and broadband infrastructure projects.

But no, Republicans want tax cuts. And they are furious that the law won’t allow them to use the covid money to pay for tax cuts by “legislation, regulation or administration” through 2024. They also can’t deposit the money into pension funds. And they are pissed.

Senator Mike Braun, Republican of Indiana, introduced legislation to reverse it.

“Democrats are trying to ban states from cutting taxes with a sneaky amendment to the $1.9 trillion so-called Covid relief package,” Mr. Braun said. “Not only did this blue-state bailout bill penalize states for reopening by calculating state funds based on unemployment, now they are trying to use it as a back door to ban states from cutting taxes.”

If it’s a “blue state bailout” bill, then how come red states are getting money, too?

There is one other way the red states can waste the covid money, a means discovered by Missouri Governor Mike Parsons. They can refuse to spend it at all. They could pile it up under mattresses or use bags of cash for doorstops. Anything but put it into circulation.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

The Kansas City Star editorial board had some choice things to say about the tourism promotion plan. It’s not clear to me if the plan was implemented, though.

I have little faith the $5 billion coming to Missouri will be spent in any way that will do anyone any good. I’ll try to keep watch and let you know. And it’s very likely a lot of red states will manage to piss the money off, somehow.

Illustration for Little Black Sambo board game, 1924.

I seriously hate the term “cancel culture” and think the whole controversy is bullshit. But now I’m seeing People Who Ought to Know Better wringing their hands over the “canceling” of six Dr. Seuss books and fretting that “canceling” is getting out of hand.

To which I say, get over it. This is not new. When I was a small child in the early1950s I remember being read Little Black Sambo (1899), still considered a kids’ lit classic at the time even though Langston Hughes had blasted it back in the 1930s as hurtful to Black children. In its day I believe Sambo was at least as widely read as The Cat in the Hat (which has not been “canceled,” I hope you know). It’s hard to find copies of Sambo now, although I understand the basic story (which is charming) has been retold in other children’s books in less blatantly racist ways.

The six Dr. Seuss books dropped by the publisher, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, are And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer. Those last four I never heard of, and I have no memory of reading the first two, although I had heard of them. But I learned through googling that Mulberry (1937), at least, does have objectionable illustrations such as the one on the left. This is not something that would be published today.

Mulberry is still available via Amazon, through resellers. A hardback copy is going for $749.99. If you have an old copy in the attic, you might want to find it now.

The argument was made that we shouldn’t judge the Seuss books based on today’s standards of what’s acceptable.  That’s a lecture I make about historical figures and documents all the time. But I doubt that a parent reading the Mulberry Street book to a child is going to stop and explain why the illustration of the “Chinaman” isn’t acceptable, especially at a time when anti-Asian discrimination and violence are on the rise in this country.

Consider the old blackface minstrel shows. It’s one thing to learn about them as an artifact of history. It’s another entirely for someone to produce them today and bring them to a theater near you.

I want to call your attention to this story in the New York Post, which begins:

First it was Huck Finn. Then it was JK Rowling. Last week it was “The Muppet Show.” This week it’s Dumbo. It’s only a matter of time before “Star Wars” gets canceled and you know it.

Will Gen X please stand up? I have something I want to say to you — to us.

We grew up in a country that didn’t ban books. We all agreed that witch hunts and blacklists were bad. Censorship was an outrage. The 1980s were not that long ago. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and The Muppet Show are as available as ever, as are JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books. (Rowling has been under fire because of comments about trans women.) Controversy and criticism are not censorship or “cancellation.” Dumbo got into trouble because of the crows, of course, and isn’t being shown or marketed by Disney any more.

There has always been controversy about art, you know. Did you know that Jonathan Swift (the author of Gulliver’s Travels) tried to stop the Dublin premiere of Handel’s Messiah oratorio in 1742? Many people thought it scandalous to present a musical work about Jesus in a music hall, to a paying audience.

Closer to home, remember all those years in which the Right tried to shut down the entire National Endowment of the Arts because of the infamous “Piss Christ” photo (1987)? Republicans did succeed in cutting the NEA budget, mostly riding on outrage about that photo. Somehow that doesn’t count as “cancelling.” Odd, that. But let’s go on.

In fact, all kinds of stuff was censored and revised and “canceled” before 1980. I take it the author of the New York Post article was only discussing the post-McCarthy period, say about 1960, until 1980, as the time when “witch hunts and blacklists were bad” (there was a lot of witch hunting and blacklisting in the 1950s) and “censorship was an outrage.” Books banned somewhere in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s included J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye (naughty words); John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (explicit sex); Judy Blume, Forever (teenage sex); Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (anti-Christian); and Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (naughty words).  Seriously, a lot of books were tossed from schools and libraries in the 1960s and 1970s, usually by conservatives.

Now, let’s go back to publishing and what I saw as a worker bee in the publishing industry, beginning in 1973 and my first job as a college graduate, working as a production editor for a university press.

In the 1970s, as the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism were having an impact, publishers realized that much of their backlist (older books still being reprinted and sold) contained a lot of racist and sexist crap that was suddenly embarassing. Those books were either revised for reprinting or quietly dropped from publishers’ catalogs. This was going on in academic and mass market publishing alike. And many children’s books, not just Sambo, were either retired or re-illustrated.

By the late 1970s I was working for a small publisher in Cincinnati, and we were going to produce a joke book for after-dinner speakers. The author was an older guy who had long made a living as a motivational speaker. One of his “jokes” was about wife beating. It’s a joke that might have been told by a stand-up comic on the old Ed Sullivan Show in the early 1960s. It probably was, actually. But in the 1970s, not so much. Attitudes were evolving.

I deleted the “joke” from the manuscript. The author was outraged. My manager, also a woman, backed me up. A lot of male managers might not have, yet. The stuff about his frigid wife and shrewish mother-and-law (mainstays of stand-up comedy once upon a time) stayed in, though.

I also remember being given the task of revising a backlist how-to book that was still selling well but was badly dated in many ways. It was full of such charming asides as “This is so simple even your wife could do it.” I rewrote a lot of that one. If the author complained I never heard; he may have been deceased.

“Serious” academic books also came under scrutiny. Before the 1970s one might often be reading a scholarly account of some ancient battle between, say, Persians and Greeks. And then you’d run into a sentence like “The Persians overran the Greeks and stole their women.” Somebody’s consciousness needed to be raised.

In the 1970s there were many studies and symposiums and what not examining conventions in language, with the aim of making our language more inclusive and respectful. It was during this period that, for example, mailman became mail carrier, chairman became just chair or chairperson, and retarded became developmentally disabled,  This didn’t happen all at once; it was a long-drawn-out process taking place mostly in academia and publishing.

At some point, the people engaged in this process began to refer to is as “political correctness,” a phrase that had been coined in the 1930s to describe the way people in totalitarian states like the Soviet Union or Third Reich had to watch what they said. This was a kind of in-joke, originally. Then somebody published a humor book about political correctness that poked gentle fun at the process. This process did get a bit silly at times. I remember a manuscript for a middle school social studies text in which somebody wanted to change “Viking oarsmen” to “oarspersons,” for example.

The humor book became a best seller, and then everybody knew the phrase “political correctness.” PC became a pejorative in the 1980s and 1990s as conservative academics like Allan Bloom were fretting that the old Euro-centric curricula in literature and liberal arts generally were being challenged in favor of something more global. And then by the 1990s “PC” had become a rallying cry for bigots who resented having their speech corrected. I remember reading a social-psychology paper ca. 1998 that proposed White racists sincerely believe all other Whites are just as bigoted as they are but won’t admit it “because they’re just being PC.” “Political correctness” to right-wing extremists became a kind of censorship that didn’t allow people to speak “truth.”

And this brings us back to the Right’s phony outrage over Dr. Seuss books they’ve probably never read or cared about until they heard they were being “canceled.” Notice that news stories about the deicision by the publisher to drop six lesser-known and dated works from the backlist are nearly all illustrated by pictures of the beloved Cat in the Hat, who has not been affected in any way.

If these six books were not by such a famous author the publisher might have tweaked the text a bit and hired a new illustrator. That’s been done with some old children’s books; mostly readers don’t notice.

And it’s also the case that publishers drop books from their lists all the time and let them go out of print. If the publisher freely chooses to do this, it’s not censorship. It’s a business decision.

But let’s look at who is trying to “cancel” books because they don’t like the content. According to the American Library Association, the ten most challenged books of 2019 were mostly attacked because of their LGBTQ-inclusive content. Social conservatives were trying to get them out of schools and libraries, and probably succeeded in some places.

One of the two exceptions was The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. The other exception was the Harry Potter series, but not because of JK Rowling’s comments about trans women. According to the ALA, the series has been removed from some schools and libraries “for referring to magic and witchcraft, for containing actual curses and spells, and for characters that use ‘nefarious means’ to attain goals.”

Damn, those spells really work? I’ll have to look some of them up again.

At the New York Times, Zachary Carter says the coronavirus killed the gospel of small government. I doubt this is true; one suspects the true believers will take their dream of drowning government in a bathtub to their graves. But what Carter writes is still very much worth reading. Among other things, Carter writes that the U.S. response to the pandemic was hampered by decades of neglecting the nation’s problems.

Doctors and nurses were left without basic protective equipment because the United States lacked the manufacturing capacity to produce it. Efforts to track and contain the virus were delayed by bottlenecks in test production and shortages of supplementary equipment like swabs. Once tests could be administered, a nationwide scarcity of test-processing equipment prolonged the delivery of test results.

The reason: More than a decade into a hospital-closure crisis, the United States faced a shortage of beds and medical facilities necessary to manage an emergency. Hospitals overrun with Covid-19 patients turned away ambulances. Vaccine distribution, while steadily improving, has been hampered by shortages of both staffing and supplies. The poverty of local government infrastructure has disgraced the rollout further. Websites crash, phone lines are busy, parking lots are full.

These are not only public health failures but also economic failures — an inability to marshal resources to solve a problem. And the often-toxic incompetence of American political leadership has obscured the structural causes of this failure.

See also The Dead End of Small Government.

Once upon a time the U.S. regularly made robust investments in infrastructure, space flight, scientific research, education, etc. The amount of such investment as a percentage of GDP plummeted in 1980, Carter wrote. Good old Reaganomics. Tax cuts were more important. As a result, when the pandemic came and we needed secure infrastructure and supply lines and something at least resembling a public health system, we were in trouble. Various commissions over the years had warned that we were unprepared to deal with various sorts of crises for various reasons, but these concerns were not addressed by our government. “And the past year has exposed its impoverished thinking: The trouble was not spending too much ahead of the crisis, but spending too little — on research, infrastructure and manufacturing capacity,” Carter writes.

So we went into the pandemic with a lot of handicaps. The biggest handicap was Donald Trump. I am sure many books will be written about all the ways Trump’s so-called response to the pandemic was unacceptable, but for now I want to focus on vaccines.

Trump and his supporters want you to know that we have vaccines because of his stability and genius, or something. There’s a lot of confusion about exactly what the Trump Administration did and did not do, so let’s look at that.

Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” provided grants to pay for research and development of vaccines. Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and some other companies took the grants, but Pfizer did not. Since Pfizer’s was the first vaccine to be approved for emergency use, one wonders if the grants really speeded up the development part. However, Warp Speed also paid to have vaccines manufactured in advance of approval so that they would be immediately available if approved. Waiting for approval to begin manufacturing would have added a few months to the wait time, I understajd. So, credit where credit is due; vaccines were available more quickly than they would have been otherwise.

However, the pre-orders were relatively small. For example, the pre-order to Pfizer was for 100 million doses, or enough to vaccinate 50 million people. The European Union pre-ordered twice that. And then in late December, in response to criticism of the scarcity of the vaccines, the Trumpers released all of the inventory. When Joe Biden took office, the stockpile was depleted.

The Trump effort completely fell apart in the distribution phase. The Trump distribution plan was, mostly, let the states figure it out. See No, Trump Doesn’t Deserve Credit For Planning Vaccine Distribution by Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo.

A look at what actually happened in the Trump administration’s last months shows that the White House lacked a plan for the “last mile” of distribution, leaving that to the states while lobbying Congress not to pass much-needed funding that would spur state and local governments to get the vaccine into arms. …

…What the Trump administration left the country with was a partnership with pharmacies to vaccinate nursing homes — the only real footprint of a federal plan to deliver vaccine into people’s arms. And even that foundered amid allegations of inefficiency compared to states that opted out.

What’s more is that that one plan only covered the first phase of distribution: nursing home residents and hospital workers, who received inoculations from the medical facilities at which they worked. It set the Biden administration up for a “vaccine cliff,” an outcome that was avoided in part due to the outcry over the sheer ineptitude of the effort’s early stages.

Josh Marshall explained this more succinctly:

 The administration had a system and funding for getting assisted living facilities vaccinated and I believe also health care workers vaccinated. But that program and funding was designed to run out at the beginning of February. And that was it. So it seemed almost intentionally designed to get everyone pumped up about getting vaccinated and then have all the plans and money run out about one week after Biden’s inauguration. So a pre-planned train-wreck on Biden’s watch.

Beyond that, there was no plan other than to dump the vaccines onto the states. The Trumpers couldn’t even manage to communicate to states what to expect and when, making the two-vaccine protocol a tad difficult to coordinate.

Josh Marshall also has a long post about why the Trump response was so screwed up, which unfortunately is behind a subscription wall. Basically, he says that the early phase of Warp Speed, sending money to pharmaceutical companies, was the simple part. The federal government has a lot of money. It got sent to pharmaceutical companies. Not that hard. But the vaccine distribution part is extraordinarily complex, and it’s obvious the Trumpers just couldn’t do it. They lacked experience and expertise and, worse, had no respect for those who did have experience and expertise. They were too stupid and incompetent to realize how in over their heads they were.

And Trump himself is nothing if not risk-averse. His pattern throughout his time in the White House was to refuse to deal with difficult problems and then blame whoever did take on the problem for screwing it up.

From the very start of the Pandemic in the first weeks of 2020 the Trump administration consistently sought to disclaim responsibility for things that would be genuinely difficult and could have challenging or bad outcomes. Push the tough tasks on to others and if it goes badly blame them. This frequently went to absurd lengths as when the White House insisted that states short on ventilators at the peak of the spring surge should have known to purchase them in advance of the pandemic. Over the course of the year Trump spun up an alternative reality in which the US was somehow still operating under the Articles of Confederation in which individual states were responsible for things that have been viewed as inherently federal responsibilities for decades or centuries.

But in a lot of ways Trump wasn’t that much of an outlier. Ever since the rise of Reagan and of “movement conservatism,” the pattern has been to cut taxes, cut spending, trust the “free market” to solve problems, listen to ideological crackpots instead of experts, and when things get screwed up, blame liberals. And here we are.

Just about exactly one year ago, when we were just beginning to face the pandemic, Jamelle Bouie at the New York Times wrote a column headlined “The Era of Small Government Is Over.” He understood what we were about to go through. Unfortunately, the column should have been headlines “The Era of Small Government Should End Now, But It Probably Won’t.” Because it didn’t. And there are plenty of people in government who embrace their “small government” fantasies even now.

But maybe the influence of “small government” ideology will shrink enough that we can drown it in a bathrub. Then something good will have come out of this awful pandemic.

The covid bill passed in the House today, and just a few minutes later Merrick Garland was confirmed as attorney general. Finally. Earlier today, Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio) was confirmed as the new secretary of housing and urban development. We’re on a roll.

Polls, including a new CNN poll, have found that the covid bill is very popular with the U.S. public. I suspect it will become even more popular as its provisions go into effect and people learn what they all are..

It got not one Republican vote in either the Senate or the House.

Naturally, there are pundits saying that the Democrats are taking a big risk with this bill. At National Journal, for example, veteran pundit Charlie Cook says that by ramming through this huge bill with no input from Republicans, President Biden is killing the possibility of any other bills passing with Republican votes.

“Biden may have, in the early moments of his term, crippled his ability to do grand bargains,” Cook sniffs. “When the histories of the Biden presidency are written, there’s a fair chance that this will be looked upon as a serious error of judgement—one that may plague this administration for a good while.”

Yeah, I remember all the success President Obama had with “grand bargains.” I guess Charlie Cook has forgotten that.

Republicans also are calling the bill a “liberal wish list.” Like that’s a bad thing. Paul Waldman:

Another word for “wish list” is “agenda.” And yes, Democrats have used the American Rescue Plan to advance a good deal of their agenda. That’s what happens when a party gets power: It passes legislation, and that legislation reflects the preferences of its members and their constituents. That Republicans are treating that as somehow unusual or inappropriate is positively bizarre.

That goes along with Republicans’ deeply held belief that no Democratic official is ever legitimately elected.

What Republicans should worry about is that, after years of gridlock, at least some things are going to happen. Lots of people will benefit directly from the covid bill, with more money in their pockets. The rate of vaccination is picking up considerably, and I suspect most of us who are really eager to get vaccinated (I got mine already) will get that accomplished in the next couple of months. Barring further disasters, the economy should be heating up considerably soon.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be engaged in nothing else but gutting popular voting provisions in their states. They are not just passing bills that are blatantly aimed at suppressing minority votes; they are putting up obstacles to voting that will suppress their own voters.

Republicans are flogging culture war issues as hard as they can. But they are having a hard time connecting outrage about un-gendered plastic toys to Joe Biden.

Paul Waldman:

The difference between now and 12 years ago — when we were also in the midst of an economic crisis and had just passed a large stimulus bill — couldn’t be more stark. Back then, Republican culture-war rabble-rousing was focused directly on the president, with every one of Barack Obama’s policies shunted through a prism of resentment and White status anxiety. …

… But when the leader of the Democratic Party is Joe Biden, the whole enterprise of linking that cultural anxiety to policy arguments breaks down.

If you’ve lived in a red state during election season — and I advise you avoid doing so, if possible — you have witnessed how ferociously Republican candidates blame all the nation’s woes on liberals. This includes economic woes. To hear them talk, you’d think FDR-style liberals have been in charge of federal and state budgets for the past 75 years.

But in fact, especially since the late 1970s, conservatives have pretty much had a stanglehold on economic policy, both in many states and in Washington. Even presidents Clinton and Obama were able to put only a few cracks in the austerity-and-tax-cuts wall. And for a time congressional Democrats became deficit hawks, adopting paygo rules that stipulated any spending increase must be offset by a cut somewhere else.

States were and are even more extreme at times. In many red states, services have been cut to the bone to pay for tax cuts. Kansas got so broke it had to shorten the school year to close schools early. The tax cuts were supposed to create a flood of new businesses and jobs flowing into Kansas. They did not.

This will not surprise many of you, I’m sure. But there is new evidence that red states have been growing poorer and blue states richer, and the reason is … conservative economic policies don’t work. Imagine. Greg Sargent:

So once again a well known political figure has been accused of being sexually inappropriate. Often opinions about such accusations fall along partisan lines. That’s not the case with Andrew Cuomo, however. A lot of Democrats don’t like Andy, either.

Let me say right off that I don’t have a strong opinion about whether Andrew Cuomo should resign as governor of New York. Conventional wisdom says he won’t. A Quinnipiac poll conducted March 2-3 found that 55 percent of New York voters don’t want Andy to resign, although that could change. It’s also being reported that Andy has always aimed at serving four terms as governor, which would better his legendary father Mario, who only served three. Andy is up for re-election in 2022.

In all the years I lived in New York I can’t say I was ever a big fan of Andy’s. Sometimes he did things I liked; sometimes I disagreed with him. I could never see that his being governor made any big difference in the state from the tenure of the last long-serving governor, Republican George Pataki. In between Pataki and Cuomo were two-short term Democrats, Eliot Spitzer and David Paterson, both of whom left office under clouds of scandal.

In all the years I lived in the greater New York City area I never was able to wrap my head around what goes on in the state government in Albany. I don’t think anybody knows. I imagine it to be a dark place, full of locked doors and funhouse mirrors. I also never had a sense that either the state or the city were being managed all that well. Certainly a lot could be done better.

But back to Andy. He has long had a reputation for being an abrasive bully, so when multiple accusers say he runs a hostile and toxic workplace I am inclined to believe them. But whether that or the accusations of his being a sexually inappropriate creep rise to the level of stuff that automatically forces one to resign is a matter of opinion.

I’m seeing a lot of speculation on social media that the accusations against Andy are somehow being generated by the Trump camp. The theory is that if they can replace Andy with a Republican, and Trump is convicted if some crime in New York state, the Repubican governor will pardon him.

Let me say that this is farfetched. First, the accusations against Andy aren’t exactly coming out of left field. Like I said, he’s long been known to be a bully.

Second, any Republican, especially one known to be a fan of Donald Trump, is a long shot to win a statewide office in New York next year no matter whether Andy is running or not. It’s a blue state. The last re-elections of senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand were landslides. Democrats hold huge majorities in both houses of the state legislature. A moderate Republican *could* win the next gubernatorial election, perhaps, but not a really Trumpy one.

It might be notable that in the 2018 elections, Kirsten Gillibrand won 67 percent of the state’s votes, but Andy received 59 percent. That’s still a respectable win, but the difference suggests some frustration with Andy. And Andy might be more vulnerable in 2022 than he was then. Perhaps if Republicans really are scheming to replace him with one of their own, they might do better running against Andy than someone else.  (See The Democrats who could take Cuomo’s place at Politico.)

I do think we need to come to some kind of general agreement as to what constitutes “due process” in these situations; “these situations” being lapses of character that weren’t criminal, or if they were criminal there is not enough evidence for a proper trial. We want to avoid rushing to judgment. I am still sorry that Al Franken was pushed out of the Senate so quickly. And remember Tara Reade, whose allegations against Joe Biden eventually fell apart under scrutiny? On the other hand, such accusations ought not to be easily dismissed but given a respectful hearing. I think we’re still in the “respectful hearing” phase of the Andrew Cuomo scandal story.

And I think the situation with covid patients in nursing homes is the bigger deal.  If a third scandal were to emerge in the next few months, Andy would be toast. And I would be okay with that.

The best news I’ve heard in a while — Joe Manchin has blinked, a bit, on the filibuster. Politico:

Sen. Joe Manchin said Sunday he is open to altering the Senate filibuster to make it more “painful” for the minority party to wield, while reiterating his opposition to ending the procedural hurdle altogether.

“The filibuster should be painful, it really should be painful and we’ve made it more comfortable over the years,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Maybe it has to be more painful.”

Manchin (D-W.Va.) has previously supported efforts to require senators to filibuster by talking on the chamber floor in order to hold up a bill, an idea he raised on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“If you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there and talk,” Manchin said. “I’m willing to look at any way we can, but I’m not willing to take away the involvement of the minority.”

Forcing Republicans to resort to an old-fashioned talking filibuster to delay votes would, first, mean that they’re not going to block everything just to block it. And when they do try to block a bill, they would have to draw a lot of attention to themselves in doing so. and if they stop talking, the bill could pass with a simple majority. The current Senate rule that requires 60 votes to allow a bill to be voted on is just too easy. The Constitution says that bills can pass with a simple majority, not a two-third majority.  If they’re going to block legislation that people want, let them work for it and stick their necks out for it.

Note this from Josh Marshall:

Key from Manchin. Filibuster reformers have been saying consistently that change will only come if it can be packaged as “saving” the filibuster by “reforming” it. And as you can see here that’s exactly where Manchin goes. pic.twitter.com/HbVUZKkQwe

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 7, 2021

Got that? Changing the rule would not be ending the filibuster but preserving it (wink, nudge). Josh Marshall continues, “Don’t pop any corks yet. This is going to be a process that plays out over a good bit of time. But this is about the most optimistic I’ve been yet that we’re going to see real, game-changing change on this issue.”

See also Joe Manchin opens the door to filibuster reform and How the filibuster broke the US Senate at Vox.